Blossom and Burn
by ficcychick
Summary: A continuation of the story until Fever comes out. Gabriel and Rhine are on their way north to find Rowan. Switched to third person, may move back and forth between Rhine/Gabriel's story and Linden's.I will consider suggestions. A teetery T rating.


Okay, so I just finished the first book, and intrigued by the characters, I wanted to continue the story until Fever comes out in a few months.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

The sun was already up when Rhine was awakened by someone entering her room. She expected it was Gabriel, bringing her breakfast and a hidden June Bean that would taste of warm summer peaches, staining her mouth red, and her mouth began watering at the imagined taste of its tart sweetness. She turned over in her bed, pushing her pillow away, and saw Linden silhouetted in the doorway.

"Linden?" Her speech was foggy, still enveloped in a blanket of sleep.

The figure strode forward, and she could see that it wasn't her husband at all, but his father. Housemaster Vaughn's face, so much like his son's, was a mask hiding the evil within—the murder of his own grandchild, the experiments, the fact that the ashes Linden had been given were not those of his beloved wife, whose cold dead body was hidden somewhere in the bowels of the house.

"Good morning, sweetheart," he said, using the term of endearment she had given Linden when trying to win him over. Coming from Vaughn's lips, the word was cold, dark, completely removed.

"Where is Linden," Rhine asked, trying not to let her voice tremble. "Where is my husband?"

"My son is with another of his wives," the man said, with enough emphasis to show that he wanted that knowledge to hurt Rhine, to twist her with jealousy. "The cold fish, I think. But let's not worry about them." He kept advancing toward the bed, and Rhine huddled back against the headboard.

"He can't be with Jenna. Jenna's dead," Rhine said, even though she knew Housemaster Vaughn knew that better than anyone. After all, he was the one who killed her, who fed her body poison to mimic the disease and watched her die, all because she wasn't what he had wanted for his son. To Vaughn, Jenna's only use was as another body for his experiments, his fight to find a cure to save his son, and if that failed, his son's son.

"Do you dare to question me, child?" Vaughn stopped his approach and shook his head, a smile creeping across his pale lips. "I fear I may have to make this harder on you than I thought."

Rhine's eyes widened as she realized what he intended. After all, Jenna had told her what Vaughn had done to her—why had she thought she might escape the same fate?

She cringed against the headboard as Vaughn drew closer, pulling his shirt off and unbuttoning his pants. She could already see his maleness as he drew the zipper down.

"No," she begged. "Please no." Her strength was gone, her resolve to emerge from this house unscathed shattered as soon as the mattress sank under his weight. "I've never even…Linden and I haven't…" She couldn't manage to form the words to tell him that she was still a virgin, that Linden hadn't truly claimed her as his wife.

"Now, now, sweetheart, do you really think that matters?" Housemaster Vaughn said, reaching out for her leg. "Linden will never know the difference—he will think you were just another whore like your sister wife, selling your body on the streets to survive, and you'll never tell him differently."

"But I—" Rhine began, but Vaughn silenced her, yanking her body roughly toward him and tearing at the lovely nightgown she wore, exposing her breasts to his indifferent gaze. His eyes changed at the sight of her body, however. They clouded, grew hungry. Rhine couldn't help but wonder if he had done the same to Rose, slipped into her room while Linden was away or asleep and claimed the girl as his own.

"Please," she begged again. It was all she had left.

"It will only hurt the first time," he said, reaching his hand between her legs. "Once you've been broken it will be different. You may even come to enjoy it."

"No!" she cried out as he moved to put himself inside her. "No!"

"Rhine? Rhine, wake up. Rhine, you're dreaming." A strong hand shook her shoulder, and she realized she had been asleep. The sea had rocked her like a baby in its cradle, like little Bowen. She and Gabriel were still on the sea, had been for days as they traveled north, headed to Manhattan to find Rowan.

"Gabriel?" she said, wanting to be sure this time.

"It's me, Rhine. It's me." He moved gently to scoop her up in his arms and hold her to his chest, where he could feel hear heartbeat like wings against her breast. "It was only a dream."

"Oh Gabriel," she whispered before bursting into tears. It felt alien, the twinge, the moisture streaming down her face, leaving tracks against her salt skin. "It was Vaughn. H-he was going to…he tried to…"

"Hush now," Gabriel said, smoothing and smoothing her hair. It was dark from their days on the sea, not having been washed, and he could feel the tangles pulling against his fingers. He placed a tentative kiss on her crown. "It wasn't real, Rhine. Vaughn can't hurt you. He'll never be in a position to be near you again. I promise you."

Rhine pulled sharply away from him, her eyebrows knit together as she frowned at the boy. "You can't say that for sure, Gabriel. I know too much. You know too much. And if Linden breaks again…he won't stop until he sees me dead."

"You're no good to him dead, Rhine," Gabriel said, and she laughed in his face.

"Have you forgotten so quickly?" she asked. "Sometimes I think we're worth more to him dead than alive! How else could he perform his experiments? How else could he continue this fruitless quest to save his son?"

Gabriel reached out and laced his fingers through her own. "He won't find you, Rhine. I promise you that. He won't find you."

They floated on in silence for a while, their hands together until Rhine suddenly turned to Gabriel and asked the question she had never once wanted to truly ask herself. "What are the chances we'll find him, Gabriel? What are the chances that my brother is still out there somewhere, alive and looking for me? I can't feel him anymore. I can't sense him. What if he gave up on me?"

Gabriel didn't want to affirm her suspicions might be correct, so he pulled her close to him again. "No one could ever give up on you, Rhine Ashby."

"Ellery," she said, her voice cold. "Rhine Ellery. Ashby was Linden's name, not mine." She remained in his embrace, but her muscles had tensed. He had said the wrong thing again. He needed to stop that, to find a way to make her continue to trust him, even though he had hardly any recollection of the outside world. She was so much more experienced than he was, in so many ways, and if she realized that she didn't need him anymore where would that leave him? He knew exactly where he would be—a sad, helpless boy who had no idea how to move about in the world. Forget 25, he would probably never make it to 18.

They drifted on for a few moments more until Rhine pulled back again. "We should look for port before it gets dark," she said. "We need more fuel, I need fresh bandages and I need something more than bread in my stomach." Gabriel nodded and moved to start the engine.

Rhine welcomed the motor's humming sound. It was soothing in its monotony, in the fact that she wouldn't have to speak. Of course Gabriel couldn't understand her fears. He was a man in a man's world. Servant or not, he had little to fear apart from the worry that he wouldn't be able to feed himself, that he wouldn't have shelter, that he might be robbed. OK, certainly he could die at the hands of one of the thieves if he or she were truly desperate enough. The incident with the thief back home had taught her that. But for Gabriel there were no Gatherers filling their vans with teenage boys, driving them miles and miles away from their homes or the family they had left. There were no worries of an unknown future as a glorified breeding animal, or a messy ending at the end of a gun, hearts racing like rabbits until brain functions ceased with a bullet to the head.

He would never know the feeling of riding in the dark, huddled with half a dozen weeping girls who knew little more than you did about whether they would be dead or married at the end of the road. He would never know the sound of a half dozen gunshots as those deemed unsatisfactory were killed before his very eyes. He would never know how it felt to be pampered and preened into a kind of slavery—certainly he knew what it was like to be a servant, and the cruelties that went along with it, the fear of auction, of outlasting your purpose, but to Rhine's mind that was different. The tradition that had grown up around securing wives felt more personal, a violation of the only thing that one held sacred: her body.

Some girls wanted it, Rhine knew, girls like Cecily, because they had never known anything else. They had been raised to believe that this was all there was, being chosen to be a house governor's wife. They had been led to believe that the highest achievement they could reach was the position of first wife, the one with all the privileges, the one who was put on display. But they were also taught that being the mother of a man's children was not much less of an honor. After all, their child could be the savior of the human race, a real-life incarnation of the savior from Christian mythology, the key to cracking the genetic code of the disease.

There were also the girls who felt there was no other option, like Jenna, and as her sister wife had said, why not die in the lap of luxury instead of cold, abandoned, alone? Surely that was a better option than living on the streets, selling your body just to survive. Rhine never asked whether it had been a better option than sharing her sisters' fate. She didn't want to hear the answer. For as much as Jenna read romance novels, where everyone was happy and all dreams culminated in the realization of utter joy, she had little of it in her own life. She played her role, she laughed at Linden's jokes, cooed over his advances, shared giggles with him in the bedroom, but that was all it was: an act. As soon as Linden was gone, the real Jenna was back, the girl with the cold gray eyes and the even colder outlook on life.

Rhine had known the world, had known her parents, had even lived with them for a while until their clinic had been bombed and their existence erased. She had known flowers, real flowers that her mother had grown until the soil became completely unable to sustain life. She had smelled their heady fragrance, let it fill her nostrils the same way it continued to fill her dreams, when they weren't invaded by memories of her most recent life. For Rhine, being a sister wife wasn't enough, even with the privileges afforded her as first wife. No keycard, lustrous jewels, gorgeous ornate dresses or infinite amounts of June Beans could replace how it felt to be free, to live a day among the people, even when money was scarce and life was hardscrabble. Rhine would have traded anything, the dresses, the chamomile baths, the champagne and sweets—to be back in the basement where she and Rowan had lived.

Rhine had lost her ability to put her full trust in anyone and anything. She was glad to be with Gabriel now, but she also worried about the uncertainty of the future. She had to be prepared to let him go at a moment's notice, she knew this, no matter what she thought she felt for him. She was glad that he had escaped with her, that they had seen the movie and stolen the boat together, but she could see no more than mere moments into her future and therefore was unsure of his place in it.

Rhine looked back at him, steering the boat, the wind tousling his hair. He looked so innocent, yet determined. He noticed her looking and smiled. She returned the smile and hoped she looked sincere, but broke too quickly, pretending to study the wound on her hand. She was kind of worried about that, it was true. The salt in the air stung it sometimes, and it looked a bit red in some places. As long as she could manage to keep it clean more often, though, she had hope that it would be fine.

Soon, after endless miles of concrete slab beaches, she spotted a port. It was an hour or two before sunset, enough time to find some food and ask their location before heading back to the boat and the ocean. Nights were cold on the water, but Rhine felt safest there. No Gatherers could reach her there, adrift at sea. There was no fear of meeting Vaughn on the water, or Linden since his father had ensured that he would be afraid of the sea.

She motioned to Gabriel to head in toward the dock, and he nodded, having already seen it. The beach looked small, but there was a fueling station and a restaurant nearby. Rhine wasn't sure how they would be able to pay for either of these things, but there was no way around it. Both the boat and their bodies needed fuel, regardless of whether or not they were able to pay for it.

The docking procedure was relatively painless, and after tying off, they stepped from the boat. Rhine felt strange to be on solid ground again, and she could feel her head swimming with the rocking motions the boat had made over the past few days. It was eerily silent in the little town, but no alarms went off in her head as they made their way to the restaurant. After all, the neon "open" sign was flashing and Rhine could hear music coming from within.

Gabriel pushed the door open, and Rhine followed. Almost instantly the music stopped and the patrons turned to look at them. One of them, a huge brute of a man who had to be first generation, stood up and looked down upon them.

"Well just what do we have here?" he asked, his face growing menacing. Rhine reached out and clutched Gabriel's hand for support.

"Just looking for some food and fuel," the boy said, swallowing the great lump in his throat that had suddenly risen from his empty stomach.

"Well, boy, you'll find both of those here," the man said, and chewed on the stem of the fuzzy-headed weed he had been working with his mouth. "But there's a price, of course."

"What kind of price?" Gabriel asked as another man laughed.

"You'll find out someday, boy," the brutish man said, elbowing his friend. "Until then, if you want food in your bellies and fuel for your boat, then your friend here had better pay up."

"What are you talking about?" Gabriel asked, and then he knew. He barely heard Rhine scream as the man thumped him on the head, dropping him instantly to the floor. The last thing he saw before blacking out was the larger man's hand on Rhine's shoulder, and he knew he had failed her.


End file.
